June 8, 2007

THE MOST POIGNANT MOMENT of the May 31 dedication of the Billy Graham Library was the tribute to the 88-year-old evangelist by 82-year-old former President George H.W. Bush.

Three former presidents were present at the dedication in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jimmy Carter praised Graham's early opposition to racial segregation. Bill Clinton recalled, with suspect sincerity, that the "best date he ever had" was taking his soon-to-be-wife Hillary to a Graham crusade 35 years ago.

But an emotional George H. W. Bush was unique in describing Graham's influence as both spiritual and geopolitical.

"The moral awakening that Billy helped to ignite starting here in America--which then spread like a wildfire across the country, and ultimately around the world--was also the same spark that ignited hope and kept its embers burning in far away places, behind an Iron Curtain," Bush recalled. "And just as there was a coalition of free nations that stood together in the face of this geopolitical threat, so, too, was there a brotherhood of great spiritual leaders--including our honoree and Pope John Paul II--whose unaffected charisma and purity of purpose played a decisive role in resolving the moral crises of our times."

Bush concluded: "No question, these men, together with other messengers who carried forth The Word, helped tip the balance in the Cold War in freedom's favor."

GRAHAM HAS BEEN America's chief religious celebrity for almost 60 years, a spiritual statesman who has been acquainted with every president since Harry Truman. Bush justifiably called him "America's pastor." So it is easy to forget where American evangelicals were when Graham's ministry began in the late 1940s.

The liberal mainline Protestant denominations firmly controlled America's religious public square when Graham first appeared on the stage. Evangelicals were commonly derided as fundamentalists, a group long since discredited by academia and the respectable denominations. The nascent evangelical subculture was just beginning to challenge the hegemony of liberal theology in America's Protestant churches.

Graham's early evangelistic crusades were famously "puffed" by the Hearst press, at the direction of William Randolph Hearst himself. But Graham's quick fame relied more on his own charisma and organizational skills than Hearst's puffing. Graham's style was revivalistic, but not chauvinistic. It recalled the better moments of America's 19th century revivalist history, while appealing to country's burgeoning new suburban demographic.

From the start, Graham was interested not just crusading soul-saving, but in the intellectual reformation of American religious thought. He helped found Christianity Today magazine to articulate mainstream evangelical thought and challenge liberal Protestant journals such as Christian Century. Symbolic of a larger transformation in America's religious demographic, Christianity Today now has nearly four times as many subscribers as the liberal flagship Christian Century.